Schlagwort: Doctoral Theses

Recently, I gathered data from the Bielefeld Search Engine BASE on the percentage of journal articles, books and doctoral theses published Open Access, licensed under Creative Commons Licenses and under Open License between 2013 to 2017.

Since dissertations have been published electronically and Open Access for a long time, they have traditionally been a document type that was more Open Science compliant than others. For example, the Open Access repository software OPUS, which is widely used in Germany, was in earlier years used exclusively for the electronic publication of doctoral theses. Unfortunately, this pioneering role could not be held: A look at the data provided by BASE shows that the Open Science penetration among theses published stagnates. BASE knows three categories of accessibility: Open Access, Unknown, Non Open Access. In the following tables and graphs, figures reported as „Open Access“ have been categorised by BASE as Open Access. The following tables show data from BASE as follows:

Indexed theses, books and journal articles (2013-2017)

Indexed theses, books and journal articles published Open Access (2013-2017)

indexed theses, books and journal articles, which are published under Open Licenses in the sense of the Open License, i. e. reflect terms of use of the Open Source (2013-2017)

Open Licenses means licenses that fulfill the requirements of the Open Definition. This applies only to two Creative Commons licenses: CC-BY and CC-BY-SA.

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

Doctoral Theses total

101,264

108,253

111,555

108,697

77,731

Doctoral Thesespublished Open Access

43,322

51,397

50,671

50,427

36,935

Doctoral Thesesunder Creative Commons Licenses

9,011

10,930

11,850

12,935

9,886

Doctoral Thesesunder Open Licenses

1,849

1,959

2,339

1,959

1,432

Books total

68,257

64,982

67,130

61,236

46,187

Bookspublished Open Access

13,847

15,405

23,007

17,232

15,643

Booksunder Creative Commons Licenses

2,519

2,869

3,515

4,611

5,940

Booksunder Open Licenses

467

533

815

1,832

2,890

Journal Articles total

1,768,791

1,957,058

2,131,604

2,005,268

1,696,182

Journal Articlespublished Open Access

782,801

940,576

1,175,890

1,117,097

1,035,434

Journal Articlesunder Creative Commons Licenses

175,887

233,968

301,124

358,274

313,227

Journal Articlesunder Open Licenses

84,548

105,820

141,038

168,626

175,587

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

Doctoral Thesespercentage: Open Access

43%

47%

45%

46%

48%

Doctoral Thesespercentage: CC-licensed

9%

10%

11%

12%

13%

Doctoral Thesespercentage: Openly licensed

2%

2%

2%

2%

2%

Bookspercentage: Open Access

20%

24%

34%

28%

34%

Bookspercentage: CC-licensed

4%

4%

5%

8%

13%

Bookspercentage: Openly licensed

1%

1%

1%

3%

6%

Journal Articlespercentage: Open Access

44%

48%

55%

56%

61%

Journal Articlespercentage: CC-licensed

10%

12%

14%

18%

18%

Journal Articlespercentage: Openly licensed

5%

5%

7%

8%

10%

Although doctoral theses already had a high share of Open Access by 2013 (43%), by 2017 it had risen by only 5% (2017: 48%). At the same time, the proportion of books published Open Access rose by 14% (from 20% to 34%) and articles by 17% from 44% (2013) to 61% (2017). The same effect can be seen in the proportion of CC-licensed items: Their share rose by 4% (from 9% to 13%) for doctoral theses, by 9% for books (from 4% to 13%) and 8% for articles (from 10% to 18%) between 2013 and 2017. However, the share of openly licensed items is most pronounced: it did not increase for doctoral theses, but remained at 2% between 2013 and 2017; in the same period it increased by 5% (from 1% to 6%) for books, and by 5% (from 5% to 10%) for articles. Even though this figure is illustrative, they show that although dissertations were published in earlier years more compatible with Open Science than books and articles, their penetration with Open Science stagnated and today they are compared with books and articles less compatible with Open Science.

The proportion of books available under CC licenses rose sharply compared to the number of doctoral theses licensed under CC licenses and reached the same percentage in 2017.

As the proportion of doctoral theses available under Open licenses stagnated the percentage of openly licensed books outnumbered theses already in 2016.

The data to this posting is available as:

Ulrich Herb (2018). Numbers of Articles, Books and Dissertation theses indexed in BASE and percentages of items published Open Access, under Creative Commons Licenses and under Open Licenses (2013-2017) [Data set]. Zenodo.Online: DOI:10.5281/zenodo.1189807